The problems of Civ VI that will not be fixed in the next espansion

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

Let me preface this with my personal experience. I have played every Civ game at the time of release. Civ 4 is my favorite, Civ 5 is my least favorite. In both cases, this is strong preference.

Having technology earlier than in the real world has a strong tradition in Civ, I remember sometimes having tanks at 0 AD in Civ 1. Also, with tech trading you usually got better technology earlier in the higher difficulties levels. This is not a real excuse, but I think there are two other things to consider:

a) No Civ game has real decline and collapse of powerful empires like the real world. I think it is hard to claim that the real world scientific progress is necessarily even close to as fast as it could have been.
b) Every Civ game has pacing problems, where you are not able to have early Empires that are as large as some historical empires (e.g. Rome), as those would very quickly progress you out of the appropiate era. This has a downstream effect.
c) You want to have each of the main eras last for a similar amount of time in the game. This is another thing that needs to be balanced, and affects overall technological progress.

So this is not an real issue for me; it is not the job of Civ to produce a perfect simulation of actual human history.

Here is a list of my main flaws with Civ 6, that I do not think will be fixed.

• The entire Civ 5 legacy (as said, Civ 5 is my least favorite part):
  • One unit per tile, which is ok by itself, but cripples the AI
  • Busy-work without much strategic implications, this includes museum theming (clear optimal choice) and details like sending archaelogists around the map, which feels not abstract enough to fit the high-level of the rest of the game
• Production issues and scaling:
  • Chopping is too good. Bonus tiles are too weak.
    
  • Unit cost scaling is not balanced. It is too optimal to build an early army and then upgrade it all the time, due to the skyrocketing unit production costs, with which the industrial output never really catches up.
    
  • Too many city buildings that are not worth their production cost in any circumstances.
    
  • As a note, I think this is still partially the consequence of 1 UPT, as high production = many units = trouble. So production is kept low and this affects everything.

Some other things are just a matter of it being a game. Sure, access to the sea was a huge thing in the past. But if you bring this completely to Civ games, it cripples inland empires and would make some map types unfun. Making the sea stronger for trade would be very realistic, but bad for strategic gameplay. And the sea is already quite important, as naval units are incredibly strong and can easily win you wars.

Regarding how static the game: I always felt (again) that Civ 5 was the worst offender here. But this is one of the fundamental issues with Civ as a series. You tend to win or lose a game early on. Most of the time it is pretty much decided long before getting to the Industrial Age. The snowball effect is still fully in force.

So yes, Civ 6 has issues. But it was way better than Civ 5 from day 1. At least the 4 city being the optimum is a thing of the past.

Good post. Some of the criticisms levelled at VI are true of every Civ game.

1UPT frustrates me because I find it much more fun than IV's stacks but it creates other problems that haven't yet been resolved. I hated war in IV, I just found it incredibly dull and unrewarding, but there's no denying that the AI could handle it more effectively. Perhaps Firaxis could go one step further down the army/corps route and have a system that blends the best of both, I don't know.

 

[AriochIV]

1UPT frustrates me because I find it much more fun than IV's stacks but it creates other problems that haven't yet been resolved. I hated war in IV, I just found it incredibly dull and unrewarding, but there's no denying that the AI could handle it more effectively. Perhaps Firaxis could go one step further down the army/corps route and have a system that blends the best of both, I don't know.

I find 1UPT even with incompetent AI to be more fun than stacks of doom ever were. One stronger stack trying to force a weaker stack to fight is neither tactically compelling nor representative of real combat.

Unfortunately, I think the corps/army system has made the AI perform even worse. The AI is terrible at keeping its units alive, and so having fewer, more expensive units is a losing strategy for the AI. I'm constantly running into AI civs in the midgame that have lost their entire army (and which don't seem to be able to replace it... though that is probably a separate issue).

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

Unfortunately, I think the corps/army system has made the AI perform even worse. The AI is terrible at keeping its units alive, and so having fewer, more expensive units is a losing strategy for the AI. I'm constantly running into AI civs in the midgame that have lost their entire army (and which don't seem to be able to replace it... though that is probably a separate issue).

Interesting, I hadn't thought of that or noticed it. The fundamental problem is still the same I suppose, the AI is just bad at strategically maneouveing units.

In terms of the late game being static, to give Firaxis credit they have repeatedly tried to change this with new late game mechanics (corporations, world congress, espionage, loyalty) but they haven't yet solved the problem. I am hopeful that GS will be the best yet in this regard: a new WC/diplomacy system which sounds promising; natural disasters which the player can harness with late game infrastructure; climate change; management of strategic resources.

If these systems work well in conjunction with the existing espionage (could do with a revamp) and loyalty systems, perhaps the age old problem of snowballing will not be quite so pronounced.

Ever the optimist!

 

[Dirichlet]

I find 1UPT even with incompetent AI to be more fun than stacks of doom ever were. One stronger stack trying to force a weaker stack to fight is neither tactically compelling nor representative of real combat.

Unfortunately, I think the corps/army system has made the AI perform even worse. The AI is terrible at keeping its units alive, and so having fewer, more expensive units is a losing strategy for the AI. I'm constantly running into AI civs in the midgame that have lost their entire army (and which don't seem to be able to replace it... though that is probably a separate issue).

Stacks had their flaws, but I do not think this is a fair description of the Civ 4 combat system. When playing against a good opponent there was quite a bit of thought you had to put into both outmaneuvering your enemy and stack composition. There were also more direct unit counters than in Civ 6. There are several PBEM reports with those kinds of tactics on display.

From my point of views both systems work quite nicely against human opponents and are dumbed down a lot when playing against the AI, but in Civ 4 the AI could still win. And combat was faster as well.

I think another and somewhat problem related to your 2nd point with Civ 6 combat is that you can win without any cost. Against the AI you can usually retreat before losing any units because it takes several attacks to finish a unit off. Those retreated units then heal to full in a few turns at no cost at all. In Civ 4 you had to at least suicide a few siege units and could still use a few units to counterattacks or unlucky dice rolls. So taking a city at least had a cost. This problem is aggravated by corps and armies, as you point out. It also ties in with the unit cost vs production scaling problem that plagues the late game of Civ 6.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

Stacks had their flaws, but I do not think this is a fair description of the Civ 4 combat system. When playing against a good opponent there was quite a bit of thought you had to put into both outmaneuvering your enemy and stack composition. There were also more direct unit counters than in Civ 6. There are several PBEM reports with those kinds of tactics on display.

Civ IV combat was never fun though, in my opinion at least, whereas I do find it quite engaging in both V and VI despite its problems. I admit that I never explored the tactical nuances of combat in IV but this is because I found it dull and frustrating in the first place. Different strokes I guess!

 

[Craig_Sutter]

I think units taking less production to build and all builds, for that matter, being cheaper would help the AI more than the human player... it is too difficult to replace destroyed troops for the AI given the great cost and time used to reconstruct their army. Having human player units require more maintenance than AI units would allow the AI to field extra large armies that can afford to squander units as well. Perhaps that is already the case.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

This aspect, and districts, between 5->6 has been my favorite. You actually can have functional nations instead of little holdouts pocketed amongst a paradisical wasteland no one went into for some reason.


I find it hilarious he's "the steward" and his starting promotion dictates that you clear cut every tree and butcher every last sheep and cow you can find. Some stewardship! He really should have been a +bonus resources yield guy instead of chopping king.

As for everything else:
Districts scale 10x as you progress through the tree
Units scale ~10x as you progress through the tree, and importantly their cost+building cost is dictated precisely by what tier of the tree they sit on, and nothing else.
Chops scales with the exact same modifier as districts do.
Production scales with workable mines (which go from +1 to +3.)

Which of these things do not belong?
On release, we got to stack IZ + EC bonuses in every city. I recall early threads basically complaining that you got all your cities to 2-300 production and +10 amenities, they built everything, now what do you do?!
Then they hit the IZ with the nuclear nerfbat. They also later reduced science from population. But this is irrelevant; The last 4 eras of the game (industrial, modern, atomic, information) all have cost increases you have to eat, but they never replaced your ability to keep raising production except through population growth. Ever wonder why there is no card to boost IZ buildings like every other district? Because you were supposed to have stacked effects anyways. Details, details.

Since only chops keep up with costs, we chop. Then because we chop, we don't build many IZs, which means post-deforestation our cities don't really have production anyways, because we could get away with only spamming Campus/TS/CH through mid game on the chop economy. Well, I guess since we can't actually build units and buildings quickly now, so we should use our gold to upgrade the military we built before and all out rush to the spaceport and just eject ourselves from this playthrough ASAP! It all falls apart because of that decoupling.

My biggest hope for GS is that the expanded late game means we may actually have to fight a major military conflict with a tech and economic peer (because they may stop our victory through force outside of conquest wins.) If we did, people would feel very differently about late game strategy. You ask: "but how will you build your spaceports when you are building tanks and bombers?" Well, you're building spaceports, and I'm taking them!

This is a good analysis, but I think the core decoupling took place at an even more fundamental level.

The decision to remove "+% increase to population yield" effects out of buildings took away the key benefit to having large populations. In previous versions of civ, your population was your primary generator of science (now science + culture). In civ 6, buildings and districts generate most of your science and culture on their own. Higher population cities still have a benefit, but not so large a benefit that it's worth the investment required to boost housing + amenities + higher tier buildings for specialists to work. You get to the end of the tech + civics trees faster by running smaller, ecstatic empires, and not worrying about having the production to build unnecessary things. Currently in Civ 6 you don't need production to build buildings to boost population yields to pay for those buildings to keep people happy to keep people fed so you can grow population so you can start the cycle all over again etc etc

I'm looking forward to finding out if GS has changed the balance in this key area.

 

[Disgustipated]

For me, Civ 4 had the best "accuracy" in terms of getting techs at appropriate times in history. Though you can still end up ahead if you play Prince level, but you were never that far ahead like you can get in Civ 6. I agree above about combat in Civ4 not being that great. It wasn't the worst either, however. I did like that units had counters.

 

[Aristos]

Civ V nostalgia is the new Civ IV nostalgia

A testament to the decreasing quality of the series, perhaps?

 

[SammyKhalifa]

A testament to the decreasing quality of the series, perhaps?

Spoiler :

https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...gs-and-non-bugs-not-a-dicussion-thread.70063/

 

[Aristos]

Spoiler :

https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...gs-and-non-bugs-not-a-dicussion-thread.70063/

and the point is....?

 

[pgm123]

4) Rome became rich thanks to the Mediterraneum, Colonial Nations became rich thanks to the Atlantic Ocean and even nowadays an Ocean, the Pacific, is the center of the world commerce, but in Civ VI this aspect is TOTALLY ignored. Settling on the Coast can be good for Housing (still worse than a river) and really few times for resources, but having a good control of the seas is totally useless (or at least, way more useless than controlling the land). Even if you got a perfect fleet your opponent could simply ignore coastal city and you will have wasted tons of production for what? Nothing. Coastal city should have at least a good bonus for trading, and this bonus doesn't exist, because don't even try to tell me that the little trade range bonus is a good trade-off for a civ that invested a lot in the "Sea part" of the Science Tree and for the production of a fleet. Society like Venice, Genoa, the Colonial Spain, England and so on simply can't exist in a game like this, because focusing on controlling the seas gives way less advantage compared to the one you can take focusing on the same way on the land.

While I generally agree with you, there's some pushback needed. Rome was rich because it controlled the Mediterranean, but Rome itself is not on the coast--it has the port of Ostia. It controlled the port cities of Alexandria and Carthage, which were important, but it isn't really a coastal city itself. It's the equivalent of a city with a harbor district. The same can be said of London. Madrid isn't even that. What all these cities have in common is that they're river cities. Even most coastal cities also have a river. Very few of the most important cities before the modern era were on the coast. The game undervalues navy and naval trading routes and they need to be buffed somehow. But that has as much to do with gameplay than history.

 

[Jaybe]

Rome was rich because it controlled the Mediterranean, but Rome itself is not on the coast--it has the port of Ostia

At the civ scale, Ostia is the harbor district for the city of Rome, which could be either on or 1 tile inland from the coast.

 

[pgm123]

At the civ scale, Ostia is the harbor district for the city of Rome, which could be either on or 1 tile inland from the coast.

Yeah. That's how I view it.

I just watched the video of the 5 largest cities throughout history. With essentially the exception of Alexandria, it has never been a coastal city before modernity.

 

[Midori]

I think I agree with some of the concerns of the OP, but Firaxis is probably in a tough situation due to trends of the game market. The price of the Civ VI base game is about the same as Civ II's, despite 20 years of inflation and the fact that Civ VI is a much more complex game. (And the Civ II AI didn't just get buffs, but actually didn't follow the same rules as human players, or in other words, cheated) Merely funding a project of this scale and its continued development seems to require selling DLC. That might be a bitter pill to long time gamers who are used to a more polished product.

It seems like they genuinely love making this game and want to make it a great experience, though, and many of the changes that came with Rise and Fall improved the balance quite a lot. I would like to continue to support that.

As far as the production issue, I think it's a matter of how it's difficult to expand borders by culture compared to Civ V (Tradition opener) or Civ IV (many buildings and wonders), and trade yields don't change based on city size/map resources, and few limits to growth, which makes city spamming the preferred playstyle. It's a little more viable to build a large city with some of the changes of R&F (simultaneum, rationalism, free market depend on adjacency and 10+ city size to get those bonuses, and big cities generate more loyalty), and that can help get production higher, but I think a "tall" strategy is still at a disadvantage most of the time. Even if you're a terrible person like me and run bread and circuses in your size 20 border cities. Coastal cities just need more buildings and advantages in general to make them special.

It does seem like there's a focus toward making the best spots on the map more historically meaningful with this expansion, though, so I think it's a positive sign.

 

[RealAntithesis]

The AI is probably the thing that took all the fun out of my last game. I was having a good time battling it out with Harald, who had a huge navy, eras ahead in science than me and probably the third most powerful civ on earth. Due to his ineptitude in naval combat, I was gaining the upper hand, but had only taken 3 cities, 2 of which I released back to the city states they once were.

Harald's armadas tended to just sit there taking a pounding from my ships without attacking the next turn. They didn't even move..

Then I got a peace offering, consisting of all of his luxuries and resources, and all but one of his cities (about 12 of them - larger than my empire). I then wanted him to concede one of the cities I had taken, and he took the entire offer off the table, and nothing would bring it back.

He then repeated this offer a couple of turns later, which I accepted, and after 5 minutes of the game doing nothing (presumably busy converting all his cities to mine), I found my new empire had pretty much doubled, along with my science and culture output.

Harald had just given up and threw the towel in. He was nowhere near to losing. Then the game got boring and I started a new one.

 

[EgonSpengler]

While I generally agree with you, there's some pushback needed. Rome was rich because it controlled the Mediterranean, but Rome itself is not on the coast--it has the port of Ostia.

At the civ scale, Ostia is the harbor district for the city of Rome, which could be either on or 1 tile inland from the coast.

Likewise, Piraeus was the Harbor District for Athens, whose City Center would be a hex or two inland, depending on the scale of Civ map you play on. I think only on the smallest maps would Athens/Rome be right on the coast, with Piraeus/Ostia directly adjacent. And it's no coincidence that so many of these Ancient Era maritime powers were in the Mediterranean, a sea that's small and placid, which you can circumnavigate in relatively shallow water, hexes that would be Coastal on a Civ map, with only a few hexes of deep water in the middle. There was a lot of Ancient Era maritime activity in the Black & Red Seas, too, but before the Age of Sail, real oceans were almost literally death incarnate.

 

[pgm123]

Piraeus is a bit trickier because of the long walls connecting it to Athens. It's only an hour from the acropolis on foot. Ostia is 6 hours from the Forum. But even if we shrink the maps a bit and list Rome and Athens as coastal, you still have most great cities inland.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Long distance sea trade has always been more profitable than long distance land trade:

(a) it takes less energy to move goods by sea (especially important when shipping commodities like grain, wood, etc.)
(b) you don't have to invest in the maintenance of roads
(c) you don't have to pay a toll to every lord whose land you cross

The state of naval technology limited where sea trade could take place. First you couldn't stray too far from visible land marks. Then you couldn't stray too far into rough waters. Eventually you could sail anywhere on the planet.

The behaviour of coastal people impacted the reliability of sea trade. Pirates / privateers / state sanctioned piracy - all of these had an impact on the likelihood of your ships making it safely home.

All of the above can be easily modelled in Civ through a boost to the relative profitability and number of trade routes accessible from a city / harbour:

• Restore the extra trade route available to a city with both a Harbour and a Commercial Hub.
• Nerf land routes so that sea routes become more important.
• Change trade routes so they all give some food, some production, and some gold, and then add culture and science and faith to the international routes.

That should do it. Cities on or near the coast of a body of water with lots of good trading partners will then grow naturally.

 

[bumpyglint]

Saying "Rome" I was meaning the Roman Empire! Anyway I think we all can agree that expecially in the past the sea trade routes where incredibly important for a country, but I think that Firaxis can't just give a boost to them.
First, because at the moment there's not a real difference between sea routes and land routes, the same route can pass both from land and sea, and as a second reason because in Civ VI they decided that the major way to build streets is with land routes (another nerf to sea routes....), so if everybody would just use sea routes thanks to their bonus nobody would use land routes.
That's why I think this problem will not be solved in the next espansion: they should design again from the beginning this system, but there's no sign they will do it (and for sure not in gathering storm...).